Researchers who contributed to RIT receiving nearly $103 million in sponsored research awards during the past fiscal year, including 10 faculty members who reached or surpassed $1 million this past fiscal year, were inducted into the yearly classes of PI Millionaires.

Four RIT faculty members are opening up soft matter physics, sometimes known as “squishy physics,” to a new generation of diverse scholars. Moumita Das, Poornima Padmanabhan, Shima Parsa, and Lishibanya Mohapatra are helping RIT make its mark in the field.

Lishibanya Mohapatra, an assistant professor at RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy, hopes that a better understanding of how living cells maintain the size of their organelles can lead to therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. She earned a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how cells control the size of organelles.